Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The purpose of cyberpunk

This entry was originally posted on 22 October 2004 at 12:06 p.m.

Lately i've been thinking about the whole idea of cyberpunk. In many ways over the years, it has gone from being a revolutionary concept around which stories revolved to being a plot device that simply exists as a convenient way of getting the characters from point A to point B.

On a related note, one of things i've been thinking about is breaking things down to their base levels, and whether or what perspectives genres add to storytelling.

If you have a story about a person whose essence has been uploaded to a global network, is it really anything more than a ghost story? If the character in the story takes the form of a program who has been exiled from a specific server, is it really any different from the story of a person who's been banished from his tribe? Maybe it would have to be a tribesman with magial powers, maybe the character would have to be a shaman--but really, is there any difference? Does putting human characters within the confines of intelligent programming really change the story all that much?

Does it all boil down to setting, or is there actually something different about this kind of story? Is it just another way of telling a tale that already exists--with a setting that's more reflective of today's technology (and hence, updated, or at least more fashionably clothed metaphors)?

Bottom line: is there really anything that cyberpunk can do that non-cyberpunk fiction can't? Is it just fancy dressing, or does it really teach us something new about humanity?

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